I have met tons of people that were intelligent in terms of IQ but they lack something I would call being intelligent in a broader sense. And inversely, I have met tons of people who were smart in a broader sense yet they lacked IQ. And third, which is fortunately the best, are the people who possess both of these attributes. The last is the most prevalent as the abilities oscillate around the “g factor”.
The concept of the g factor is the very ability to solve very general problems. It strongly correlates with socioeconomic outcome (such as income, job prestige), job performance, morbidity and morality. It also strongly correlates with talent and creativity.
Folks that are intelligent only in IQ may be highly performing pupils, high school or college and university students. Their mental processes are quick, patulous and they make great engineers, medical doctors or – if their IQ is so high – scientists.
But they lack something that would make them intelligent not only in terms of IQ. For example, poor life choices (divorcing from someone good, marrying someone bad, having a child when burdened with pathogens, idebting despite obvious inability to pay the debt), inability to understand the world and make deductions, poor understanding the politics, easily being manipulated by fellow people or media, and remembering something important and being able to use it later on.
Once again, be sure these things have a strong correlation, these are overlapping sets.
And I have met people whose IQs were pretty low, but the people were attentive to the environment, remembering it and then being able to use it (politics, business, banking, and so on), were educated in psychology, sociology, philosophy, law or evolutionary psychology.
My psychiatrist had been given an assessment of a middle-aged engineer that revealed he had dementia. My doctor with a fellow female doctor said it couldn’t have been possible and they were correct. His Performance IQ was 100 and his Verbal IQ was 140 which explained the varying results on dementia tests. My point is you can be an engineer with such a low IQ.
Being a top physicist, programmer, or mathematician doesn’t require so much of critical thinking, lack of cognitive biases, fallacies, logical formal errors, but the thing we call the “g factor” – IQ. Even though the people are stupid in “overall” assessment and, for example, have a poor talent for learning foreign languages etc.
And finally, we are getting to the two extremes: a man with an IQ of 160 who can perfectly assemble blocks (perform extremely well on IQ tests) but cannot be an engineer, doctor, or be smart in a broader sense.
And the second aberration is a man with an IQ of 80 who understands high school mathematics and is educated both formally and informally. It’s just a statistical concept, though enormously significant.
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